Corporate application of TODCM

[jyupangco]

Hi David,

I am thrilled about your application. It seems that the focus of this application however is for academic purposes. Is this correct? What levels: elementary (k-12), secondary, and/or post-secondary? What about corporate applications (mapping of courses/curriculum to a position in a company)?

[David Tong]

Hi,

This application was designed for academic purposes but it can work in a company too. All companies need training and the bigger ones would have multiple training programs. There will be many instructors for the training programs and the instructors do come and go. So, how do companies keep the training class experience consistent? This is where TODCM comes to help maintain and manage the training curriculum. A new instructor comes in and he/she can use the TODCM application for reference and also retrieve feed backs and opinions from other instructors.

The lingo on the site can be easily translated to support a corporate environment and the unit page formart can be modified according to each company's training requirements. Some people though this is eLearning application for students/learners. It wasn't designed to be one but I think it could work as a very specialized eLearning platform if someone is looking to put resources into a system for learners/employees to retrieve information such as job requirements, responsible tasks and instructions for each task. So, you have a system that can store the knowledge for all job positions in a company, a very valuable asset for any company. But, TODCM has no eLeanring features such as quizzes, assignment submission etc.

For a full-feature eLearning system, I would recommend Moodle. I had spent a lot of time doing Moodle consulting and had written plenty of code inside Moodle. It comes with almost any eLearning features you can think of, and many people think it is the best open source eLearning application including myself. We are planning to integrate TODCM with Moodle within a year.

BTW, I am thinking to make a customer support system for internal use by utilizing TODCM's software template framework. It should only take me 2-3 weeks to make one if I have the time...

[David Tong]

Hi David,

I am thrilled about your application. It seems that the focus of this application however is for academic purposes. Is this correct? What levels: elementary (k-12), secondary, and/or post-secondary? What about corporate applications (mapping of courses/curriculum to a position in a company)?

Wups, forgot about the grade levels. TODCM is for all levels - K12, primary, secondary, adult education, university etc. Current TODCM production sites are mostly K12 and adult education. There were few universities including some well-known ones (at least one is in the US top 20) downloaded the software. Most universities have a huge curriculum but without a curriculum mapping/management system. I think most of the commercial curriculum solutions are targeted at the K12 levels and not as flexible as TODCM so it is difficult for the universities to find a suitable solutions. TODCM is extremely flexible and I think it can fit into any university with some degree of customization.

[jyupangco]

Thanks TODCM Guy!

Actually we (Lambda Solutions) is a Moodle Partner, so I am on the look out for making Curriculum Management and Mapping easier. What about a scenario where the courses offered are self-paced and/or open-enrollment (start date and end date depends on the learner)

?

Hi,

This application was designed for academic purposes but it can work in a company too. All companies need training and the bigger ones would have multiple training programs. There will be many instructors for the training programs and the instructors do come and go. So, how do companies keep the training class experience consistent? This is where TODCM comes to help maintain and manage the training curriculum. A new instructor comes in and he/she can use the TODCM application for reference and also retrieve feed backs and opinions from other instructors.

The lingo on the site can be easily translated to support a corporate environment and the unit page formart can be modified according to each company's training requirements. Some people though this is eLearning application for students/learners. It wasn't designed to be one but I think it could work as a very specialized eLearning platform if someone is looking to put resources into a system for learners/employees to retrieve information such as job requirements, responsible tasks and instructions for each task. So, you have a system that can store the knowledge for all job positions in a company, a very valuable asset for any company. But, TODCM has no eLeanring features such as quizzes, assignment submission etc.

For a full-feature eLearning system, I would recommend Moodle. I had spent a lot of time doing Moodle consulting and had written plenty of code inside Moodle. It comes with almost any eLearning features you can think of, and many people think it is the best open source eLearning application including myself. We are planning to integrate TODCM with Moodle within a year.

BTW, I am thinking to make a customer support system for internal use by utilizing TODCM's software template framework. It should only take me 2-3 weeks to make one if I have the time...

[David Tong]

Actually we (Lambda Solutions) is a Moodle Partner, so I am on the look out for making Curriculum Management and Mapping easier. What about a scenario where the courses offered are self-paced and/or open-enrollment (start date and end date depends on the learner)?

If TODCM has to handle a self-paced course then we can put a customized template plugin that can decide what to show to each student/learner on the unit page. The TODCM template interface is extremely flexible and access control can be done at each module (a TODCM unit page typically has about 8-10 modules). We were able to use this design to put in a workflow process in the teacher performance evaluation feature for one of the schools running TODCM. BTW, TODCM doesn't have a guest or student interface yet. Right now, it only supports admin and teacher user roles. But, it is not that difficult to add the student and guest support, it would take me couple weeks to make the code changes.

On a side note, I was able to integrate Moodle with PowerSchool and Maze SISs. These were full integrations - users, courses, classes, student-course, student-class, teacher-course and student-class. The parts where matching users with courses and classes (includes group and grouping support) were most difficult. They were written with layers and the design allows adding new SIS plugins to support more SISs. I think no one else had done this kind of full integrations with Moodle. I have been focusing on TODCM for the past couple years and never had the time to enhance these integration tools. Had a hard time finding qualified developers to work on the tools...

It's nice to see a fellow Moodler here!

[chris_joomdle]

Hi there,

Very new to TODCM and am very interested from a company point of view (my own education business which does curriculum development and delivery - math primarily) and also from the integration with Moodle / Open Source perspective.

I note your comments re student interfaces and moodle integration. Thus I am trying to understand where you see this going. Today, correct me if I am wrong, I see TODCM being used by the school admin and teachers for planning of content according to their learning objectives, monitoring of the content delivery and feedback. I do not see TODCM being involved in the delivery of the content, say for Moodle for online or actual worksheets for classroom. Is this assumption correct?

As it relates to Moodle delivery, do you see TODCM
a) creating the courses codes, descriptions, dates, etc. and pushing these to Moodle?
b) creating course outlines/topics and learning paths and pushing this to Moodle?
c) creating questions / quizzes and pushing these to Moodle?

I can see a) & b) happening nicely but not the actually quizzes, questions, class work content required in the delivery. Is this correct? But on the other hand I would want to link a particular quiz and/or question to a learning objective. mmmmm

How / Why do you see students coming to TODCM? For the sole purpose of evaluating / providing feedback on teachers? Wouldn't this be better as an activity in Moodle that pushes the results back to TODCM avoiding multiple UI for the students? Single-sign-on can be achieved assuming the appropriate hooks / APIs in TOCDM. Or is the student integration much bigger?

What about SIS? You mention Powerschool & Maze. How do you see TODCM hooking into these or tools such as OPenSIS, Focus, etc.? Again, I can see the courses being planned, teachers assigned and pushed into the SIS but not the operations of the classes such as student attendance, grades, etc. Again, is this correct?

As mentioned, from my own company point of view I am keen to understand more because we have built around 600 lessons tying them back to the learning objectives. Today, we do much of this in word and excel which is somewhat messy (and dangerous) - I am sure you would know better than me. We have our learning objectives etc built into our "Master" Worksheets which is then used to create teacher and student worksheets/versions. As we speak, we are migrating the word docs to the community version of KnowledgeTree to maintain the versions. Ie Pure document management. It would be ideal if TODCM allowed me to not only create the learning objectives but attach my master, teacher and student worksheets, teachers notes, and additional resources to the units. Perhaps, even eliminate the master version by way of the meta info in the TODCM database, This would require attachments, downloading and version control management ie document management to be built in. Alternatively, a hook from TODCM to KnowledgeTree or similar. Any thoughts or plans on this?

From a different perspective, Joomdle is an integration between Joomla and Moodle. We have been working on this for about 18 months now and have been focused at using Joomla as the web content platform and Moodle as the course delivery. User interface, e-commerce, course registration, parent views, student views, calendars, grades review, etc. are provided through Joomla leaving Moodle to focus on what it does best - content delivery, assessment and tracking. Also included is SSO, profile syncronising, messaging, etc. We are now looking at how to tie in SIS to this ie from the teachers / operators perspective. As you know these SIS tools have interfaces for parents, teachers, students and admin. So similarly, bring data from the SIS to the parents in Joomla where they are comfortable and have their 'other' stuff. Now I sit here looking at TODCM thinking .. wow where can all this lead.

I would love to know where you see TODCM going and how much of the adjacent business processes you see it taking up so that we can keep this under consideration as we improve the parent and student experience in Joomdle. At this point I do not see any overlap and to be honest very little integration opportunities as Joomdle is focused on parents / HR managers / bosses and students. Where, at this moment I see TODCM focused on the school operations and teachers.

Regards,
Chris

[chris_joomdle]

Sorry. Just came across other posts which are linked in topic such as this moodle one

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4

[David Tong]

Hi Chris,

From the way I see the workflow in a school: curriculum designing/mapping -> lesson planning -> classroom and/or eLearning. For many schools, the curriculum designing/mapping stage is still done with paper, MS Word or Excel. I have worked with a number of curriculum specialists and they are usually very impressed with the TODCM software, most of them have experience with one or 2 commercial curriculum mapping software such as Atlas Rubicon or CL Mapper etc. Each of the 3 workflow categories is big enough to have a dedicated software application. Like you, I had done plenty of integrations between different applications. I do think it is best if all major applications in a school environment are integrated.

TODCM does allow file uploads at the the site level, course level and unit level. At the unit level, there is a unit version tracking feature in TODCM, you can even compare 2 different versions visually from the same unit, it is similar to the concept of source code control and history tracking. But the file uploads are not preserved in older versions since it was my decision that TODCM is not a document management system so we put some additional code to delete the uploaded documents from the archiving units every time a new version of a unit is created with all pre-existing uploaded files. It is not that difficult to take out the upload deletion in TODCM to preserve all the document versions though.

TODCM is still in its infancy stage and I have to spend much of our effort with its core functionality. Lesson planning is our next "big" feature to be implemented. This part sits between curriculum mapping and eLearning so by nature this is a critical component to integrated the whole workflow I mentioned. The lesson planning feature is not even on my drawing board yet so there is not much information I can share for now. I don't think there is an open source package specialized in lesson planning so it would be nice to make one available. There are a number commercial vendors selling their lesson planning software or offering as a web service.

The goal of TODCM is to provide curriculum mapping, professional development and lesson planning in a single package. And then we will start look into integrating various applications such Moodle with TODCM. Yes, it does look like TODCM is targeted at teachers and administrative staffs only, students' involvement is minimal.

There are a lot of nice features for curriculum mapping I like to implement for a long time but they are such huge tasks and I have to put them into the back burner for now. Sharing standards and learning targets between schools is one of them but the amount of coding and the level of complexity is so huge that I don't have the time to tackle it now...

Cheers,
David

[chris_joomdle]

Thank you very much for your immediate response. I'll have a closer look at the ability to manage the files in the units. I agree it's an easy to use tool and perhaps because of this I have overlook that capability. Thanks for sharing further details too - I am sure I can learn a lot in this area from yourself and this project.

Chris